The situation

Here's my situation - the full overview of traffic on this blog since it's beginning, according to Google Analytics. Spikes, which happen when something goes viral, all over the place. At this point, I'm almost at 100 posts, and around 10 are worth mentioning, making it on a single or more platforms. The list almost fully corresponds with my internal top list, and you can click on any of them if you would like to what they're about. Quite various, actually.

The platforms

There is no viral without the platform. While Facebook may have been the biggest referrer of traffic in this blog's history, it's a stable referrer, which can hardly make something viral. Twitter is better, since the whole concept behind retweeting can amplify you outside your social circle, even though it's much harder to master. But the platforms really worth mentioning are the community based curation / recommendation engines: Reddit, StumbleUpon and Hacker News. They are much more complex to use, since you have to be a part of the community one way or another, but that's how it works - there is no taking without giving.

Top referrers for stritar.net. Twitter referrals are included in Twitter and t.co.

The downside: publishing to all these channels and the aftercare (commenting, animating) can take quite some time, but you're nothing without it.

Conclusion

If you have good content, going viral can be managed and influenced, and it happens when the parameters align. Since you have to have as many chances for that to happen, you need to blog as much as you can. That's the real recipe, if there is any. For permanent readers, for real supporters that can help you tip the scale, for additional lottery tickets.

But why go through all this trouble? Well, imagine getting 100 likes and comments on a Facebook post. Or 20 retweets of a really witty tweet you're so proud of. Multiply that by 10, and you'll get the picture of how it feels when you go viral. That's why you blog in the first place, you only don't know it.